Making Sensornet MAC Protocols Robust Against Interference

• Radio interference may lead to packet losses, thus negatively affecting the performance of sensornet applications. In this paper, we experimentally assess the impact of external interference on state-of-the-art sensornet MAC protocols. Our experiments illustrate that specific features of existing protocols, e.g., hand-shaking schemes preceding the actual data transmission, play a critical role in this setting. We leverage these results by identifying mechanisms to improve the robustness of existing MAC protocols under interference. These mechanisms include the use of multiple hand-shaking attempts coupled with packet trains and suitable congestion backoff schemes to better tolerate interference. We embed these mechanisms within an existing X-MAC implementation and show that they considerably improve the packet delivery rate while keeping the power consumption at a moderate level.

Subject headings

NATURVETENSKAP  -- Data- och informationsvetenskap (hsv//swe)

NATURAL SCIENCES  -- Computer and Information Sciences (hsv//eng)

Keyword

wireless sensor networks

MAC protocols

interference

robustness

Publication and Content Type

ref (subject category)

kon (subject category)